How fast Ultra alerts really are

What we measure

For every Ultra alert about a job at a Fast-Track employer: the time from the earliest moment the job could have appeared on the employer’s site to the moment we hand the alert to our email or text-message provider.

Why a worst-case clock

We can’t see the exact moment an employer publishes a job. So the clock starts at our previous check of that site, moved earlier by the time that site’s pages may be cached. That counts the longest possible delay; the real delay is often shorter. We check each Fast-Track employer about every 5 minutes.

What counts and what doesn’t

• Counted: every Ultra alert for a job at a Fast-Track employer.
• Not counted: delays a subscriber chose, such as their delivery schedule or the Ultra email throttle.
• Not counted: jobs that never send an alert, and delivery after hand-off (inbox providers, spam filters and mobile carriers).
• Not covered: employers labelled Standard (coming in v1.1), which are checked less often, and Pro and Basic, whose timing is set by their batch and digest schedules.

The target

At least 95% of Ultra alerts for Fast-Track employers within 15 minutes, every month. It’s a target, not a promise for each alert: an employer’s site can be slow or unavailable, and providers can have outages.

How we keep ourselves honest

Besides measuring real alerts, we publish a test job every 30 minutes and time it from publication to hand-off, so problems show up even when no real jobs are posted. Reports contain overall statistics only, never personal information.